Detail of the cover of Laura Fermi and Ginestra Amaldi’s 1936 book Alchimia del Tempo Nostro, showing Robert Van de Graaff’s electrostatic generator at Round Hill, Massachusetts.
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In a recent open-access article, Adele La Rana reconstructs the history of Ginestra Amaldi and Laura Fermi’s Alchimia del tempo nostro, or Alchemy of Our Times, the first Italian book on nuclear physics for lay readers. Published in 1936, with a revised and expanded edition in 1943, it explored the rapidly developing field from the perspective of its two authors.
Amaldi and Fermi had witnessed much of that development firsthand as spouses—and, in Amaldi’s case, a collaborator—of physicists working at Italy’s Royal Physics Institute, which was often referred to as “via Panisperna” after its address in Rome. Under the leadership of Enrico Fermi, physicists there had developed the theory of beta decay and neutron bombardment techniques for inducing artificial radioactivity, among other achievements.
A writing partnership on via Panisperna
Ginestra Amaldi, née Geovene, received a degree at via Panisperna in 1931, having written a thesis on stellar temperatures. Afterward, she remained as a researcher there, though as a volunteer rather than on staff. In 1933 she married Edoardo Amaldi and continued to assist with his work, but by 1934, having been unable to find employment as a researcher in her own right, she took a job as an editor at the scientific journal La Ricerca Scientifica. From that position she was able to continue to assist the researchers at via Panisperna by facilitating quick publication of the group’s work.
Laura Fermi, née Capon, came from an upper-middle-class Jewish family. She too studied science, but left before completing her degree following her marriage to Enrico Fermi in 1928. While she didn’t have an official role at via Panisperna and did not participate in the research, she did observe the researchers themselves and assisted her husband in writing a physics textbook to help supplement their income.
As Laura recalled in her biography of Enrico, once their daughter had begun to move about and could be cared for by their nursemaid and the work on the textbook was completed, she felt the need for something to occupy her time and her mind. Enrico suggested that she try writing an original book on physics. When she objected that she didn’t understand physics well enough, he suggested that she collaborate with Ginestra, who was immediately enthusiastic.
Ginestra approached Hoepli, a publishing house that specialized in technical and scientific work (and was also a trusted collaborator with the Fascist regime, having published the official collected writings and speeches of Benito Mussolini, who had taken power in 1922). In the first half of the 1930s, Hoepli had published some fifteen books on modern physics and astrophysics, including two on atomic physics, and was immediately interested in a book on the new developments in nuclear physics.
From left, Enrico Fermi, Laura Fermi, and their son Giulio Fermi.
Amaldi Archive, Dipartimento di Fisica, Universita La Sapienza, Rome, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.
The book came together quickly, aided by the authors’ immediate proximity to the researchers of via Panisperna, and it was published in 1936. Senator Orso Mario Corbino, the director at via Panisperna, contributed a preface which described the difficulty of explaining such complex concepts to lay readers, but at the same time reduced the authors to “the gracious spouses of Enrico Fermi and Edoardo Amaldi.” The book consisted of nine thematic chapters, structured to follow the historical development of the discoveries and models that made up the new field, starting with “the atomic hypothesis” and concluding with “artificial radioactivity.”
It was described as an “excellent work” in the preface to a subsequent and much more technical book on the same topic published the following year. It was also successful for a book on a niche scientific topic, with a 2,750-copy print run and several reviews in newspapers and magazines.
The toll of Fascism and war
Following the publication of Alchimia and its favorable reception, Laura Fermi and Ginestra Amaldi took on a new project, an Italian translation of Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld’s The Evolution of Physics, which was published in English in the spring of 1938. This translation was commissioned by the publishing house Einaudi, which, as La Rana describes, distinguished itself “by its unorthodox interest in foreign cultures and by spreading topics and ideas sidelined by the regime’s cultural agenda, also thanks to the collaboration with antifascist intellectuals such as Cesare Pavese and Leone Ginzburg.”
Einaudi had initially contacted Enrico Fermi to translate the book, but Enrico negotiated a contract stipulating that Laura and Ginestra would provide the translation under his supervision, to be delivered by the end of August of that year—which they accomplished.
Unfortunately for their collaboration, the summer of 1938 also saw the entrenchment of institutionalized racism in Italy, with the promulgation of the Fascist regime’s Manifesto of Race in July and, in the weeks immediately following Laura and Ginestra’s submission of their translation, the enactment of Italy’s racial laws.
As Laura was from a Jewish family, the situation in Italy was becoming untenable for the Fermis, and they secretly planned to relocate to the United States. Their preparations included re-marrying in a church thanks to a new anti-Semitic law that had invalidated all mixed marriages performed with a civil ceremony, as theirs had been. On November 10, 1938, Enrico received word that he would be receiving the Nobel Prize; under the pretext of having been invited to deliver a course at Columbia University, the Fermis traveled from the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm to New York City in December, leaving Italy behind for good.
The Amaldis were among the few people aware of the Fermis’ plans and came to say goodbye at the train station as they left for Stockholm. Laura later recalled the significance of the parting, describing it as “the formal ending of a co-operation that had started almost twelve years previously.” There was also an argument with Ginestra, who accused Enrico of “a betrayal of the young people who had come to study with him and trusted him for guidance and help” in fleeing Italy.
The Second World War prevented communication between the Fermis and Amaldis. Meanwhile, publication of Laura and Ginestra’s translation was delayed, likely due to the Jewish descent of its two co-authors and one of its translators. Then, in 1943 the Turin headquarters of their publisher, Einaudi, were bombed, destroying the only copy of their manuscript.
The legacy of Alchimia and its authors
Despite their strained parting and the barriers between them, Laura’s and Ginestra’s friendship and partnership remained intact. In 1941 the first print run of Alchimia sold out, and Hoepli reached out to Ginestra about a revised second edition.
While the original letter from Hoepli is lost, her response emphasized that her acceptance was contingent on conditions, chiefly that “the existing text should in no way be modified in the slightest by the suppression of any name, photograph, or appreciation regarding illustrious physicists belonging to different nationalities or races.” Hoepli agreed, and the second, revised and expanded edition was published in 1943.
From left, Enrico Fermi, Ginestra Amaldi, Edoardo Amaldi, and Enrico Persico playing tennis at Pera di Fassa in the Dolomites. This was during Fermi’s last visit to Italy.
Amaldi Archives, Dipartimento di Fisica, Universita La Sapienza, Rome, AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives.
The immediate influence of Alchimia was illustrated by Italian physicist Milla Baldo Ceolin, co-discoverer of the first antihyperon, who in a 2002 article recalled spending her youth during the Second World War reading as her family sheltered in the countryside. She specifically highlighted “a little book on nuclei written by two ladies, Ginestra Amaldi and Laura Fermi. I am sure I understood only a fraction of what I was reading, but I had the intense experience of discovering what I wanted to do at the restarting of a normal life: to study physics.”
After the Allied liberation of Rome in 1944, the Fermis and Amaldis were able to resume correspondence, though the Amaldis were unaware of the Fermis’ true location in Los Alamos. In 1946, after the end of the war, Enrico offered Edoardo a position with him at the University of Chicago, though he and Ginestra ultimately decided to stay in Italy. Ginestra and Laura each pursued independent careers after that, Laura choosing historical research and environmental activism, while Ginestra championed science education through books, radio, and television.
—
Jon Phillips
American Institute of Physics
jphillips@aip.org
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